Users of mobile devices benefit from having access to location-specific timely information. Approaches to provide location-specific timely information generally fall into two categories: fixed format and freeform.
A fixed format approach allows users to contribute updates to metadata relevant to a pre-defined geographic entity in a well-defined scheme. For example, a user may be able to correct a business's opening hours or post an upcoming special event on a business's calendar.
A freeform approach includes mining locally- and temporally-relevant information from unstructured geocoded social streams. For example, trends may be detected in social posts geolocated to a certain neighborhood.